This lesbian kiss performance art isn't shocking, it's beautiful

While we tend to think of performance art as an essentially new art form, it has been around for at least 100 years. Some would even argue that its true birth took place exactly a century ago with the first Dada anti-art events at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, which sparked a whole chain of establishment-baiting artistic phenomena, from surrealism to the YBAs.

So it’s appropriate the form should celebrate its centenary with something it has specialised in from the outset: a media scandal.

Ragnar Kjartansson’s Second Movement, featuring two young women in Edwardian dress decorously necking in a boat on the Barbican’s pond may have set the press alarm frenziedly ringing – with Huw Edwards visibly lost for words while reporting on the piece on Tuesday night's BBC News at 10 – but by the standards of the glory days of early 20th-century performance art and the later events of the Sixties, it’s pretty tame stuff.

Hew Edwards reacts to Second Movement at the Barbican during BBC News at 10

There’s no obvious reason why artists performing their art rather than painting or sculpting it should be provocative – beyond the fact that many people still find any art that isn’t painting or sculpture inherently provocative.

But from very beginning the early Dadaist and Furturist performance artists went out to epater la bourgeoisie – wind up the middle classes – and they certainly succeeded in that. The first performances at the Cabaret Voltaire did it through irrationality: apparently meaningless sound poems, wild drum beating and the chanting of random messages in several languages simultaneously. The burgers of Zurich were not amused.

But it was in the early Sixties that performance art came into its own with “happenings”, a phenomenon that began in New York and had its first British manifestation in London in 1964 with Meat Joy by the American artist Carolee Scneeman, in which performers of both sexes stripped to their underpants and rolled ecstatically in heaps of offal.

'Pretty tame': Second Movement is far less provocative than performance art from the SixtiesCredit:
Tristan Fewings

Later in the decade, the self-abusive Austrian “actionist” artist Gunter Brus came close to killing himself during a performance.

This spirit continues to this day. Two weeks ago I attended a piece of Japanese experimental theatre-cum-performance art, entitled Miss Revolutionary Idol Berserker, also at the Barbican, in which water and food were hurled at the audience, and the barriers between artist and observer were exuberantly broken down. At one point two of the performers were enthusiastically giving each other “tongue sandwiches” virtually on my lap.

By these standards, Second Movement is serene and tasteful. It brings to mind one of the transgressive, but heartfelt fin de siècle paintings of the great Norwegian artist Edvard Munch: the mood of a Sapphic midsummer night transposed to the brutalist concrete of the Barbican. I think it’s rather beautiful.